I think there is such a thing as "critical mass" in a userbase
Total obviously true! And, at least for the desktop, it seems that Linux has a long way to go before critical mass...
What I'd like to see is taking the critical mass idea and applying it to boycotting:
Choose one vendor who uses a non-free codec (or other not-usable-under-linux technology) where there is a free alternative.
Organise a massive campain to boycott that one vendor only. Stay focused on that vendor until they switch to the free alternative technology or their stock drops or they go out of business.
Choose next hapless vendor and repeat.
Only this way will we ever have a shot at creating real change. I'd like to see a slashdot poll for choosing the current boycott target. Or, if you like, propose items in the "who should we boycott?" poll on my site. Follow the "Political polls" link.
Fume away. I've been frustrated by this before but think about it, it is a royal pain to maintain backwards compatibility. And "royal pain" translates into "less bang for the buck". You are better off to sell your old PC stuff or donate it to the salvation army and buy new than to think you can keep up by incremental upgrading.
I add up all the time I've spent on upgrading motherboards, processors, ram etc. etc. and it really just wasn't worth it. Just live with what you have a bit longer and buy new and sell the old. The value in that multi-kilobuck machine you bought is gone. It sells at the local flea market for $50 because that is all it is worth. Painful but true, at least IMHO.
In other words I don't think the changes in pin out etc. are really a form of planned obsolescence but really are technically driven for the most part.
I don't know what it is but when I saw "Chinese CPU" I just couldn't help somehow imagining a CPU with asian physical features and trouble handling the letter "r" in strings. Someone with a talent for art could have a field day with that line.
You might want to do a little more research. Housing price bubble bursting has happened before and the signs suggest is is in the process of happening again. Here in Phoenix AZ rents are similar to Austin Texas however house prices are substantially higher in Phoenix. Rents and prices should track and when they don't you know a "correction" is coming. Try www.patrick.net for a nice list of links to check out.
I've had some good luck and some not so good luck.
The good: I had a garage with no good lighting. Being too lazy to wire it properly I plugged a shop fluroescent into the outlet where the garage door opener was plugged in. Added an X10 controller and a couple of those stick-on switches. It worked great for years. I also used X10 to turn my pool pump on and off in a cycle that let me get much more mileage out of the pool filters. That also worked great.
The not good: the addressing scheme was too limiting. I can't recall the exact issue but several things I wanted to do were too much hassle due to the letter-number addressing scheme. Reliability and crossing household circuits was also a problem. The real problem however: there was never any real "problem to be solved". I.e. it is a solution with no problem, at least for most of us.
Parent is right on the money. I use my blackberry all the time. I don't really think about it. There was very little to learn to get productive and the physical form factor really works. My holster is almost worn out (the blackberry has popped out a couple times) and the blackberry itself has taken quite the beating. I bicycle and if it buzzes I can check email without stopping - the thumb roller makes it possible. That last might make me deserve a moderation of "darwin award waiting to happen":-)
In implantable medical electronics extremely low clock frequencies are sometimes used. I've heard of sub hertz frequencies, i.e. less than once clock pulse per second when in standby modes. Not quite millihertz but certainly decihertz.
For Shrub to have been voted in a fair vote would have needed to occur. Last time I looked into it the evidence suggested to me that the vote was rather less than fair and clean. I couldn't stomach voting for either of the buggers. Without a rational voting system (google for condorcet, approval or instant run off voting) there is zero hope of ever having a representative or sane government.
Fossil records show both times of drought and times of high waters throughout the history of the world.
Who cares about geological history? Answer these three questions: 1) Are we in it for ourselves? 2) Do we care about the quality of life our childen and childrens, children get? 3) Will the choices we make today affect question 1 and 2?
I think the answers are, yes, yes and yes. But I suppose reasonable people might disagree. In my opinion a single, two part, simple tax change would have a massive impact. Reduce income tax and make up the difference with a tax on oil. Restated: Tax the oil at the tanker and lower income taxes. Personally I'd like the reduction on income tax to be predominately in the middle and lower brackets but even if it was given to the already wealthy I'd still vote for this approach.
Keep in mind, I'm suggesting a shift in the tax burden from income to oil. Apply some economics 101 logic. Oil based products, fuel, lubricants, plastics etc. become a little more expensive and at the same time some people have a little more $$ left in their pockets after tax time. Alternative products such as vegetable oils, wood, metal become more attractive than the oil based plastics, lubricants and fuels. A shift away from oil and towards alternatives happens. From the perspective of the nations economy this seems like at least a neutral or at best a possible good thing.
With this change over time oil consumption will decrease. If there is any "free" left in the free market for oil then it seems likely that over time the oil producers will compete and cut the cost of oil in an attempt to gain share from each other. In the long term the nation pays overall less per barrel of oil and everyone (or at least some people) pays less income taxes, and best of all, less $$ flow overseas to oil rich countries.
Don't we get to a point where something that treats reprehenisble behaviours in a glorified way is socially unacceptable? I say change the game so it can only be played as a victim. I.e. the one avoiding getting car jacked. It is the same exciting scenario and might actually teach empathy instead of desensitizing the player to the pain he/she is creating (albiet, to virtual people in a virtual world).
I kinda hope they win the law suit. There is no contribution the the human condition, no insight, no teaching, nothing constructive at all from that game. Of course, now I need to go out and get a copy - it sounds like fun:-)
My understanding is that patents, originally at least, were intended to encourage inventors to disclose their ideas. The premise being that giving a short term monopoly to the inventor was a healthy trade for the public disclosure of an invention. I see this being a societal benefit in two scenarios.
1. Where an invention can be kept secret and the inventor can use the invention to make a profit. The risk to society is that the invention could conceivebly die with the inventor by never being disclosed.
2. Where the inventor might opt to never disclose an invention because he/she knows that they don't have the resources to turn it into a product and there is no way they can capitalize on their idea.
So, given those two factors it seems to me that 90% of patents are given for things that don't need any patent protection because there is little or no risk that the inventors would opt to keep the invention secret.
The upshot? 99% of all patents are probably "defensive" patents. What a waste of resources and I know first hand that it puts a chill on inovation. Have a good idea? Don't waste your money developing it into a product or trying to patent it. Chances are someone is already sitting on a submarine patent with that same (probably obvious to "one trained in the art") idea waiting to bleed you dry via laywer blood letting.
In addition I'd love it if active noise suppression was built into more things like these. The nice thing about active suppression is that you then need less volume for the music to sound just as loud. I use sound suppression when talking on skype and because the humm of the computer and other background noises are suppressed I can hear much better than with the sound suppression turned off.
Ah, but some details were left out as an exercise. If my weight is stable (I'm old) then I'm not sequestering any CO2 in my body. A little research will yield all the details needed to indicate that 99% of the carbon what someone ingests ends up back in the atmosphere as CO2 unless they are putting on weight. As I've suggested here on slashdot in the past, we could use population growth as a carbon sequestering methodology but I suspect most rational people are not keen on the unintended consequences - parking problems and overcrowded campgrounds in the summer time come to mind.
... or which get caught by fisherfolk and ultimately end up on my table and... yep, you guessed it... back in the atmosphere as CO2 (some details left out as an exercise for the reader)...
Careful with the air compressor. Gentle puffs blow out dust, a blast can wedge dust, crumbs, boogers etc. deep into contacts and other places where they might do more damage than if just left alone. Just speaking from experience here:(
No where in the article did it say that the number of people headed to a particular floor was a factor. I suspect 10 pushes of the 10th floor button is equal to 1 push of the 10th floor button.
You have piqued my curiosity. I don't find slashdot particularly ugly considering what it sets out to do. Do you have an example of a similar site that, in your opinion, is more attractive? I'm putting together something with similar goals (but non-techy) and I'm seriously interested in what it is about/. that so many people dislike. Qualifier: I *know* that I have absolutely no ascetic sense:-).
It would be quite easy to achieve what you want on linux
God I wish this were true. Yes, in theory all the pieces are available to make this work and it probably does work for the handful of skilled Linux users who have time to tweak all the necessary bits and pieces. I've been using Linux as a primary pc at home and at work for years and I still dread setting up sound to work as well as I'd like. I know it can be done and I've done it. But I know I'll have to figure it all out again when I have to rebuild a machine due to hardware problems or such like and I know it will take a lot of time that I just can't afford. I don't mean to imply that Winders is better. I dread working on that also. I installed skype (on Linux) and got it to work (yeah!) but on kubuntu it is untrustworthy because kde gets control of the sound system and relinquishes control only after a delay if kde has produced a sound. I.e. it isn't seamless, I can't give it to my wife to use because she'll click to call someone and kde will have control and skype won't work. Funny though, as I write this I remembered "artswrapper" which I didn't think to try. The point still stands. For the technically adept with ample time on their hands, sure, it can be done. For the rest of us (we have lives remember?) its a pain. There is a lot of churn in the Linux world, kde vs gnome, arts vs esd vs ??, etc. There is an upside to this churn as I'm sure the competion is generally healthy, but the downside is some serious pain for us end-users who really just don't want to spend an evening trying to figure out how to make non arts aware apps co-exist with arts apps.
You might want to rely on Nuclear energy, I don't trust neither the guvment nor the corporations to safely manage something with the damage potential of nuclear power gone wrong. Neither corps nor guvments have a history of integrity and acting responsibly. I say give them the least amount of rope for hanging us with possible. That is, keep dangerous stuff like nukenergy out of their hands as much as possible. You can't render thousands of acres uninhabitable for centries by a wind farm going awry because some official made a dumb short sighted decision.
I hope someone mods the parent post up. For me the only morally acceptable policy would be to tell the Chinese Government to please block my site from access in China. Of course if you are beholden to shareholders (who seem to tend to lean more to the financial side than the moral side of these choices) then the behaviour we are seeing in Microsoft is what will happen.
My favorite solution: tax only stuff that isn't made by human hands. It's an old idea but study it for a while and I think it might make good sense. Google for Henry George for the classic arguments behind the idea. Just think, no taxes on income, goods or services and yet plenty of tax dollars available.
For that matter, it's starting to make sense why so many libertarians/Libertarians are also Christian. It takes a mind capable of swallowing "God loves humanity, but he'll send most humans to Hell" to swallow the idea of "to make the market more open to little players, we'll let the big players do whatever they want".
This is complete Orwellian doublethink, and utter nonsense to boot.
Wow. Well put. I'd like to make that into a signature. Of course you just pissed off a whole lot of folks. Mostly the kind who think in sound bites and struggle with complex ideas:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Total obviously true! And, at least for the desktop, it seems that Linux has a long way to go before critical mass...
What I'd like to see is taking the critical mass idea and applying it to boycotting:
Only this way will we ever have a shot at creating real change. I'd like to see a slashdot poll for choosing the current boycott target. Or, if you like, propose items in the "who should we boycott?" poll on my site. Follow the "Political polls" link.
Yeah but surely google looks for the same data stored by multiple people and keeps only one copy of it around?
Fume away. I've been frustrated by this before but think about it, it is a royal pain to maintain backwards compatibility. And "royal pain" translates into "less bang for the buck". You are better off to sell your old PC stuff or donate it to the salvation army and buy new than to think you can keep up by incremental upgrading.
I add up all the time I've spent on upgrading motherboards, processors, ram etc. etc. and it really just wasn't worth it. Just live with what you have a bit longer and buy new and sell the old. The value in that multi-kilobuck machine you bought is gone. It sells at the local flea market for $50 because that is all it is worth. Painful but true, at least IMHO.
In other words I don't think the changes in pin out etc. are really a form of planned obsolescence but really are technically driven for the most part.
Someday it may have to have a Chinese CPU in it
I don't know what it is but when I saw "Chinese CPU" I just couldn't help somehow imagining a CPU with asian physical features and trouble handling the letter "r" in strings. Someone with a talent for art could have a field day with that line.
You might want to do a little more research. Housing price bubble bursting has happened before and the signs suggest is is in the process of happening again. Here in Phoenix AZ rents are similar to Austin Texas however house prices are substantially higher in Phoenix. Rents and prices should track and when they don't you know a "correction" is coming. Try www.patrick.net for a nice list of links to check out.
Damn, my mod points expired yesterday. I'd be modding this post "insightful++" if I could.
I've never had good luck with X10 devices.
I've had some good luck and some not so good luck.
The good: I had a garage with no good lighting. Being too lazy to wire it properly I plugged a shop fluroescent into the outlet where the garage door opener was plugged in. Added an X10 controller and a couple of those stick-on switches. It worked great for years. I also used X10 to turn my pool pump on and off in a cycle that let me get much more mileage out of the pool filters. That also worked great.
The not good: the addressing scheme was too limiting. I can't recall the exact issue but several things I wanted to do were too much hassle due to the letter-number addressing scheme. Reliability and crossing household circuits was also a problem. The real problem however: there was never any real "problem to be solved". I.e. it is a solution with no problem, at least for most of us.
Parent is right on the money. I use my blackberry all the time. I don't really think about it. There was very little to learn to get productive and the physical form factor really works. My holster is almost worn out (the blackberry has popped out a couple times) and the blackberry itself has taken quite the beating. I bicycle and if it buzzes I can check email without stopping - the thumb roller makes it possible. That last might make me deserve a moderation of "darwin award waiting to happen" :-)
In implantable medical electronics extremely low clock frequencies are sometimes used. I've heard of sub hertz frequencies, i.e. less than once clock pulse per second when in standby modes. Not quite millihertz but certainly decihertz.
For Shrub to have been voted in a fair vote would have needed to occur. Last time I looked into it the evidence suggested to me that the vote was rather less than fair and clean. I couldn't stomach voting for either of the buggers. Without a rational voting system (google for condorcet, approval or instant run off voting) there is zero hope of ever having a representative or sane government.
Fossil records show both times of drought and times of high waters throughout the history of the world.
Who cares about geological history? Answer these three questions: 1) Are we in it for ourselves? 2) Do we care about the quality of life our childen and childrens, children get? 3) Will the choices we make today affect question 1 and 2?
I think the answers are, yes, yes and yes. But I suppose reasonable people might disagree. In my opinion a single, two part, simple tax change would have a massive impact. Reduce income tax and make up the difference with a tax on oil. Restated: Tax the oil at the tanker and lower income taxes. Personally I'd like the reduction on income tax to be predominately in the middle and lower brackets but even if it was given to the already wealthy I'd still vote for this approach.
Keep in mind, I'm suggesting a shift in the tax burden from income to oil. Apply some economics 101 logic. Oil based products, fuel, lubricants, plastics etc. become a little more expensive and at the same time some people have a little more $$ left in their pockets after tax time. Alternative products such as vegetable oils, wood, metal become more attractive than the oil based plastics, lubricants and fuels. A shift away from oil and towards alternatives happens. From the perspective of the nations economy this seems like at least a neutral or at best a possible good thing.
With this change over time oil consumption will decrease. If there is any "free" left in the free market for oil then it seems likely that over time the oil producers will compete and cut the cost of oil in an attempt to gain share from each other. In the long term the nation pays overall less per barrel of oil and everyone (or at least some people) pays less income taxes, and best of all, less $$ flow overseas to oil rich countries.
I don't see "slippery slope" in that statement. Care to explain in a little more detail for those of us who did Philosophy 101 more than 15 years ago?
Same with the "red herring". The examples seem related to the original premise to me.
Don't we get to a point where something that treats reprehenisble behaviours in a glorified way is socially unacceptable? I say change the game so it can only be played as a victim. I.e. the one avoiding getting car jacked. It is the same exciting scenario and might actually teach empathy instead of desensitizing the player to the pain he/she is creating (albiet, to virtual people in a virtual world).
:-)
I kinda hope they win the law suit. There is no contribution the the human condition, no insight, no teaching, nothing constructive at all from that game. Of course, now I need to go out and get a copy - it sounds like fun
Just to add to the parent posts point:
My understanding is that patents, originally at least, were intended to encourage inventors to disclose their ideas. The premise being that giving a short term monopoly to the inventor was a healthy trade for the public disclosure of an invention. I see this being a societal benefit in two scenarios.
1. Where an invention can be kept secret and the inventor can use the invention to make a profit. The risk to society is that the invention could conceivebly die with the inventor by never being disclosed.
2. Where the inventor might opt to never disclose an invention because he/she knows that they don't have the resources to turn it into a product and there is no way they can capitalize on their idea.
So, given those two factors it seems to me that 90% of patents are given for things that don't need any patent protection because there is little or no risk that the inventors would opt to keep the invention secret.
The upshot? 99% of all patents are probably "defensive" patents. What a waste of resources and I know first hand that it puts a chill on inovation. Have a good idea? Don't waste your money developing it into a product or trying to patent it. Chances are someone is already sitting on a submarine patent with that same (probably obvious to "one trained in the art") idea waiting to bleed you dry via laywer blood letting.
In addition I'd love it if active noise suppression was built into more things like these. The nice thing about active suppression is that you then need less volume for the music to sound just as loud. I use sound suppression when talking on skype and because the humm of the computer and other background noises are suppressed I can hear much better than with the sound suppression turned off.
Ah, but some details were left out as an exercise. If my weight is stable (I'm old) then I'm not sequestering any CO2 in my body. A little research will yield all the details needed to indicate that 99% of the carbon what someone ingests ends up back in the atmosphere as CO2 unless they are putting on weight. As I've suggested here on slashdot in the past, we could use population growth as a carbon sequestering methodology but I suspect most rational people are not keen on the unintended consequences - parking problems and overcrowded campgrounds in the summer time come to mind.
... or which get caught by fisherfolk and ultimately end up on my table and ... yep, you guessed it ... back in the atmosphere as CO2 (some details left out as an exercise for the reader) ...
Careful with the air compressor. Gentle puffs blow out dust, a blast can wedge dust, crumbs, boogers etc. deep into contacts and other places where they might do more damage than if just left alone. Just speaking from experience here :(
No where in the article did it say that the number of people headed to a particular floor was a factor. I suspect 10 pushes of the 10th floor button is equal to 1 push of the 10th floor button.
You have piqued my curiosity. I don't find slashdot particularly ugly considering what it sets out to do. Do you have an example of a similar site that, in your opinion, is more attractive? I'm putting together something with similar goals (but non-techy) and I'm seriously interested in what it is about /. that so many people dislike. Qualifier: I *know* that I have absolutely no ascetic sense :-).
It would be quite easy to achieve what you want on linux
God I wish this were true. Yes, in theory all the pieces are available to make this work and it probably does work for the handful of skilled Linux users who have time to tweak all the necessary bits and pieces. I've been using Linux as a primary pc at home and at work for years and I still dread setting up sound to work as well as I'd like. I know it can be done and I've done it. But I know I'll have to figure it all out again when I have to rebuild a machine due to hardware problems or such like and I know it will take a lot of time that I just can't afford. I don't mean to imply that Winders is better. I dread working on that also. I installed skype (on Linux) and got it to work (yeah!) but on kubuntu it is untrustworthy because kde gets control of the sound system and relinquishes control only after a delay if kde has produced a sound. I.e. it isn't seamless, I can't give it to my wife to use because she'll click to call someone and kde will have control and skype won't work. Funny though, as I write this I remembered "artswrapper" which I didn't think to try. The point still stands. For the technically adept with ample time on their hands, sure, it can be done. For the rest of us (we have lives remember?) its a pain. There is a lot of churn in the Linux world, kde vs gnome, arts vs esd vs ??, etc. There is an upside to this churn as I'm sure the competion is generally healthy, but the downside is some serious pain for us end-users who really just don't want to spend an evening trying to figure out how to make non arts aware apps co-exist with arts apps.
You might want to rely on Nuclear energy, I don't trust neither the guvment nor the corporations to safely manage something with the damage potential of nuclear power gone wrong. Neither corps nor guvments have a history of integrity and acting responsibly. I say give them the least amount of rope for hanging us with possible. That is, keep dangerous stuff like nukenergy out of their hands as much as possible. You can't render thousands of acres uninhabitable for centries by a wind farm going awry because some official made a dumb short sighted decision.
I hope someone mods the parent post up. For me the only morally acceptable policy would be to tell the Chinese Government to please block my site from access in China. Of course if you are beholden to shareholders (who seem to tend to lean more to the financial side than the moral side of these choices) then the behaviour we are seeing in Microsoft is what will happen.
My favorite solution: tax only stuff that isn't made by human hands. It's an old idea but study it for a while and I think it might make good sense. Google for Henry George for the classic arguments behind the idea. Just think, no taxes on income, goods or services and yet plenty of tax dollars available.
For that matter, it's starting to make sense why so many libertarians/Libertarians are also Christian. It takes a mind capable of swallowing "God loves humanity, but he'll send most humans to Hell" to swallow the idea of "to make the market more open to little players, we'll let the big players do whatever they want".
:-)
This is complete Orwellian doublethink, and utter nonsense to boot.
Wow. Well put. I'd like to make that into a signature. Of course you just pissed off a whole lot of folks. Mostly the kind who think in sound bites and struggle with complex ideas